David Casarez only wanted to get his résumé out into the right people’s hands. And now thanks to one viral tweet, his curriculum vitae has made it far and wide across the internet, and now the web developer is flooding in job offers.
On Friday morning, 26-year-old Casarez got up and put a dress shirt and tie and headed to the median of El Camino Real and San Antonio Road in Mountain View, California with a hand-written sign that read “Homeless. Hungry 4 success. Take a resume.” After standing in the sun for a few hours, a driver named Jasmine Scofield stopped to talk to him. She asked for his permission to post his image online. After he obliged, she took to Twitter to post an image of him holding the sign and a closeup of his résumé. “Today I saw this young homeless man asking for people to take a resume rather than asking for money. If anyone in the Silicon Valley could help him out, that would be amazing,” she tweeted Friday at around 5 p.m. “Please RT so we can help David out!”
By the next day, her tweet had gone viral, and David had received more than 200 job offers. “Google reached out to me,” he told the New York Post. “So many other companies. Pandora. A bunch of startups. A product manager from Bitcoin.com was wondering if I could work remotely or if I want to relocate to Tokyo. But tonight, I’ll be back on my bench in Rengstorff Park.”
David, who grew up in Laredo, Texas, earned a bachelor’s in management information systems from Texas A&M University. He worked with General Motors in Austin, but after cashing out his 401(k), he moved to Silicon Valley to start his own tech startup. However, he ran out of money in June. He had been living in his van for about a year and got by with freelancing jobs. His car was repossessed last month, which is when he began sleeping in the park. “No one was hiring,” he said. “I had an interview with Apple in January, but the job was filled internally.”
While some find his story inspiring, others are critical of a work force that makes it difficult for outsiders to break in. Check out a few reactions below.